9 Responses

  1. Virtualizing BCA – What about Application I/O Characteristics ? « Stretch Cloud – Technology Undressed

    […] and VCDX #66, Michael Webster has written the other considerations in terms of Storage when you Virtualize your Business Critical Applications. Have a look at the article, he has shown the whole gamut of […]

  2. Prasenjit Sarkar (@s
    Prasenjit Sarkar (@s at |

    Michael,

    This is really nice. I wanted to make it short and crisp. But you have the whole gamut here. I like the end-to-end picture. I am writing on the RAID level case study, what to choose why to choose and when. Also backup and recovery, MTTR, MTBF determination and replication of these BCA workloads.

    So, my intention is to cut it in multiple. Please have a look at those when it is published and let others know (the way you just did) how we can leverage those factors.

    Thanks again.

    Rg,

    Prasenjit S

    Reply
    1. @vcdxnz001
      @vcdxnz001 at |

      Hi Prasenjit, You've just raised another great point. Replication overheads and the performance impacts of that on storage and applications. Also the size of each LUN and how that maps to recovery, replication, failure risks. Change rate impacts on replicated storage. These are also things that needs to be considered. MTTR and MTBF also come into it too. Google research on disk MTBF is very interesting, as it bares almost no relationship to annualized failure rate or the vendors published figures. I'll definitely be taking a look at your other storage articles when they are published and letting everyone know about them.

      Reply
  3. Sami
    Sami at |

    Fantastic article!! It just hits so many hot spots within the storage design piece.

    Reply
  4. Jonathan
    Jonathan at |

    As more and more workloads are offloaded to public clouds it would be interesting to see how the many providers manage their storage infrastructure. It's comparatively easy to manage servers which are under your control in a corporate environment, however when random customers are spinning up servers on shared infrastructure it's a lot harder to control and cater for.

    Reply
  5. Sunny Dua
    Sunny Dua at |

    I think it would be worth mentioning about the data path designs which one might take while designing the storage environment for the virtual infrastructure. Would appreciate an inclusion of vSphere NMP against some of the array based multipath solutions available. In real customer scenarios, I have seen them investing on multiple FC ports/iSCSI ports on the host end, fabric and array level, however a lot of them are unsure of how and what is best for them when it comes to selecting the multipath policies for there storage luns.

    for eg. how Round Robin is the most chosen one, however it still uses only one path at a time and moves on to the next one, once the path has reached the permissible limit of SCSI cmds or IOps.

    All in a all, a great article!!

    Regards

    Sunny

    Reply
  6. The Case for Larger Than 2TB Virtual Disks and The Gotcha with VMFS « Long White Virtual Clouds

    […] Before we get started I’d like to say this article isn’t going to cover performance of large volumes. But rather the argument for supporting larger than 2TB individual virtual disks and large volumes. There are many considerations around performance, and I will cover some of the implications when you start to scale up volume size, but for particular performance design considerations I’d like to recommend you read my article titled Storage Sizing Considerations when Virtualizing Business Critical Applications. […]

  7. VMworld US 2012 and vSphere 5.1 Launch Roundup – My First VMworld « Long White Virtual Clouds

    […] and produced very low latency. The IO Size and Latency being important factors as I outlined in Storage Sizing Considerations when Virtualizing Business Critical Applications.  See What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Platform and What’s New in VMware […]

  8. » 5 Tips to Help Prevent 80% of Virtualization Problems Long White Virtual Clouds

    […] wrote a previous article titled Storage Sizing Considerations when Virtualizing Business Critical Applications that covers some of these topics in more detail. I would highly recommend you review this as […]

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